This week the Behind KDE interview is with a well known old-timer. He is the guru of kdelibs, but do you know what he does for KDE Sysadmin? Or should I say 'did'? Leave a comment if you get his old timer joke. Meet the one who moved files manually in the CVS era. Meet the guy who developed for KDE before some of you were even born. See how Charm and jazz play an important role in his life. Meet David Faure!

Do one thing, do it well. No email checking every 15 minutes (or push email notifications), random phone calls, or twitter updates. That, combined with skill: so you don't need much time searching documentation. Just have one hour of focused work, rinse, repeat.

That productivity is just a myth :)
Peter Penz (dolphin) is way more productive than I am, in terms of commits for instance. I spend quite some time helping people on IRC these days (which is fine, and probably even more useful than simple coding).
And I pick some hard bugs so sometimes I spend 2 days debugging (like right now, in Qt's drag-n-drop code, to fix a KDE bug).

Search also techbase for "productivity", I made a wiki page with some tips on saving time doing some repetitive tasks (mostly about how to set things up for KDE development).

Anyway, the best asset for productivity is definitely knowledge/experience, indeed; if you know how to do something, you don't need to spend time searching how to do it. Or if how to debug something efficiently, you don't pick the slow way of doing it...